A typical call center includes a number of agents who handle inbound telephone calls and place outbound telephone calls on behalf of business clients, known as customers. Each agent may receive or place calls for multiple customers. Each agent has an associated agent station that includes a personal computer or workstation, a phone pad, and a telephone headset.
The customers that are serviced by the call center may be in many different types of businesses. For example, a first customer may run a mail order catalog while a second customer may seek survey information based upon a current advertising campaign. The service provided by the call center must be customized to each customer. As a result, in conventional systems, separate application programs have been developed to service respective customers by operators at the operator consoles. Information regarding the customer has generally been obtained manually and hard coded into the application programs. This approach is both costly and time consuming.